Bullshit

Being an objective and sober assessment of the people you encounter on line at the Post Office.

I love the Post Office. I think it’s frankly amazing that you can stuff something into an envelope, pay a small fee, and it shows up at its intended location a few days later. I find it incredible that you can literally get every detail wrong in the address and somehow the letter still arrives. Sure, the Post Office has problems, I won’t deny it. It requires like 15 minutes to mail a single thing to Europe, for example, so god help your immortal soul if you have, say, five things to mail to Europe. Still! I am amazed.

I understand why people hate the Post Office, however. The lines, the forms, the often unfriendly people who work there—I get it. We live in an age of wonders, and yet I have to fill out a customs form by hand and watch while the postal worker keyboards everything I just wrote down into the computer. It’s madness!

The real madness at the Post Office is the people you’re in line with. For real.

Hell’s Waiting Room

I’ve got a lot of experience with the Post Office. I started publishing my zine, The Inner Swine in 1995, and for a while I was mailing several hundred copies of that thing every few months, and I was never sufficiently organized or smart enough to do any kind of bulk mailing. So it was stamps—stamps, motherfuckers!—and envelopes and carting boxes of envelopes to the Post Office. I also used to submit short stories to magazines via mail because I was born so long ago—so very long—that there was no Internet. So I would include a self-addressed-stamped-envelope (SASE) with my submission, and I’d have to get the postal worker to weigh the whole thing and put postage on the SASE as well.

What I mean is, man, I know what it’s like to use the Post Office. And I know the people you meet in line there.

The Amazed Impatient Jackass. The rule is, any time you go to the Post Office and wait in line, someone will walk in, pause for dramatic effect, and say something like ‘I can’t believe this.’ They will then proceed to sigh every few seconds, mutter under their breath about the unbelievable length of the line, the stupidity of the people working there, and how the universe is generally speaking a torture device calibrated especially for them. They will often make phone calls so they can complain about the line to other people in real time. When they get to the window, there is a 101% chance they will get a money order.

The Confused. Man, I get it—sometimes the Post Office is inscrutable. There are strange rules and odd forms and sometimes even I get the feeling the guy behind the window is just making that federal law up to fuck with me. But then you have the people who have never in their lives sent a piece of mail, apparently. Here’s a real, actual interaction I once witnessed:

Postal Worker: You have to put a return address too.

Confused: That is the return address.

Postal Worker: … then you have to put the address you want it send to.

Confused: <grumbling> Fine. <scribbles> Here.

Postal Worker: You’ve got to switch them. You’ve got the return address in the ‘to’ line.

Confused: … wat.

I’m not making that up.

The Older Gentleman or Gentlewoman Who’s There to Buy One Stamp but Also to Chat with Everyone. They’re sweet, and I wish them well. But when they get to the window and decide to spend a few minutes telling the postal employee about the nice time they spent on line in a Post Office recently, I want them to burn.

Someday, a few centuries from now, the Post Office will have a real website that enables you to mail things with an App and, I don’t know, probably a teleportation device or perhaps an army of gnomes who will burst from the floorboards and seize your package and fly off on winged monkeys or something[1]. Until then, we’ll have to wait on line.

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[1]Remember: Sufficiently advanced technology may look a lot like gnomes and flying monkeys.

As many of you know, I currently live with one wife (the formidable Duchess) and five cats. Your reaction to the cat population in my house probably varies in accordance with your own pet population; some people have one dog or other reasonable number of small animals, reptiles, fish, or birds in their home, and think five is, like, way too many. Others have a whole second apartment they rent just to house their brood of pets, and they think we’re amateurs.

The main downside to having pets, for me, is worrying about them when we travel. As hard as I work to not go on trips (and The Duchess will tell you—at length—how good I am at being so terrible a travel partner that she thinks twice before suggesting we go anywhere these days), I’m still dragged from my comfortable home onto economy-plus flights to various places, and we have to get a small army of people to take care of the critters. Most recently we had to do this for the Christmas holiday as we visited The Duchess’ family in Texas, where we spent a pleasant afternoon watching Cary grant movies with her mother. One of those movies was Topper, and that’s a whole thing because when I was a kid I named my very first pet Topper because believe it or not, my brother and I were huge fans.

No, Seriously, It Was a Thing

So … you might be wondering what in the fuck a ‘topper’ is. It was a 1937 film starring Cary Grant, Constance Bennett, and Roland Young as the titular Cosmo Topper. Grant and Bennett play rich ‘jazzy’ types who live fast lives and torture Cosmo with their frivolity and devil-may-careness. When they die in a car accident, they return as ghosts to haunt Topper, and turn his life upside down.

It’s a light, very dated story, but it was hit and inspired several sequels and a TV series. When I was a kid, I was delighted by the way the ghosts would fade in and out; they’d often get Topper into a zany situation and then disappear when someone else walked in, making him look insane. Great fun!

Yes, my brother and I were weird.

Anyway, when I was a kid I also got Pet Fever, which happens. My parents fought the good fight. They knew that any animal brought into the house would quickly become their third child, and so they worked super hard to fight off my desire for a thing to love. One gambit that was temporarily effective was getting me a goldfish, which my brother and I named Topper in honor of my unusual favorite story at the time.

Topper was … a goldfish. He floated. He ate. He excreted this long, thin poops that fascinated us. That was basically it, but he was pretty. He didn’t live too long, which obviously means we had no fucking idea how to care for a goldfish. We basically just put him in a bowl, changed the water occasionally, and fed him with zero plan. When he died we were very sad and had a ceremonious burial, placing poor Topper in a baby food jar and burying him in the backyard. I still feel badly about Topper; when I realized that he died like, super young and it was probably because we were idiots, I had a few nightmares, and I fully expect that when I die and find myself in hell, Topper will be waiting to extract his revenge.

We then promptly got another goldfish, who died a week later. We went through another bunch of fish who all died promptly, and things began to get a little grim around the Somers house.

Enter Pissy

Speaking of weird pet names, around this time our next door neighbors, who were German and Yugoslavian, inherited their son’s cat. They didn’t want the poor thing, and left her down in their basement and gave her no attention whatsoever. I started visiting that cat every day and she was ecstatic to see me each and every time.

The name they gave her sounded to our American ears like Pisshy. So when I heard that they were going to get rid of her and campaigned to save her by adopting her, my parents (glancing at the growing graveyard of goldfish doom outside) wearily agreed with the stipulation that we could not, of course, continue to call her Pisshy. So we renamed her Missy, and all was well. I had my pet, and a lifetime preference for cats was born.

This is a long way of saying this is how you wind up with five cats: You kill a bunch of innocent goldfish through ignorance and a lack of Internet (I swear, if Google had existed in 1982 Topper might still be alive), you save a sad, lonely cat from someone’s basement, and then you deny your formidable wife a dog in 2003 and she agrees to settle for a cat, discovers she adores cats, and begins collecting them like she collects shoes.

The moment you realize you’re basically middle-aged inspires a lot of different reactions in people. Some folks get depressed and think about roads not taken, some people get obsessed with their physical condition and their conversational gambits contract down to various discussions of workouts and nutrition. Some people note it calmly and get back to work, some people have full-on crises, and some people dive into a deep smothering container of denial.

Me, I considered the unlikely fact that I survived my youth.

Je Suis Un Idiot

There’s no dramatic story behind this. I didn’t survive an avalanche or a terrorist attack, I wasn’t doing Drew Barrymore-level drugs when I was ten years old. My life’s been pretty undramatic.

I was, however, quite the idiot.

The sheer number of things I’ve done that should have resulted in my death, dismemberment, or incarceration is astounding. Again, I want to stress that this is not some hint at a dark, kind of cool secret life. This is just standard-issue jackassery that at the time seemed edgy or fun, or was simply not thought about at all. Some of it involved substances. Some of it involved just my own sense of immortality and occasionally a kind of desperate boredom I think is probably restricted to younger folks.

The scariest part? I didn’t think too hard about these scenarios at the time. I was unaware. What if I’m unaware now?

No Cure for Stupid

I mean, it stands to reason if I thought driving along Route 1&9 in New Jersey at 95 miles per hour in a 1978 Chevy Nova whose brakes barely worked was okay when I was 25 years old, I might be thinking some similarly asinine and dangerous activity I’m doing right now is okay. Which means I might kill myself and take out some small portion of the world completely unintentionally, and I’ll die with an expression of utter bafflement on my face.

It’s that realization that I’m a moron that’s so disturbing. I kind of always knew I’d die while, say, trying to drive my car over an opening drawbridge because I’m late for Happy Hour, with Waylon Jennings singing the Dukes of Hazzard theme on the stereo, but I always imagined it would be on purpose, you know? Not the result of a mild mental impairment I’ve been dealing with my whole life.

Oh well. If I’m lucky my eventual death via stupidity will result in something so spectacularly stupid it will at least guarantee that my memory will be eternal, like a plaque in the ground reading Here is the Spot Where Jeff Somers Once Set Himself On Fire Trying to Mix a Flaming Moe.

Aging, on the whole, isn’t so bad. There are trade-offs, to be sure, but overall I’ve found getting older to be mostly a positive experience, if you can believe it, largely due to the incredible jackassery my younger self engaged in on a regular basis. It’s easy to view a little gout and the inability to appreciate Soundcloud rappers as a small price to pay for a broader perspective and deeper understanding of the universe around you.

One aspect of getting older that I don’t appreciate is the Sudden Onset nature of many of these relatively minor afflictions. It’s like, you go to bed one night as You, expected and understood as a physical entity, and you wake up as You 2.0 with a bizarre new problem. For example, one evening a year or so ago I went to bed and snored like a motherfucker who swallowed a snore machine.

Jeff ‘The Buzzsaw’ Somers is Supposed to be a Cool Nickname

I can’t swear I’d never snored before, but it was a pretty rare occurrence. I know this to be fact because The Duchess is essentially The Princess and the Pea when it comes to sleep—the slightest disturbance in the force wakes her up. She has transformed our bedroom into a dark, cold, silent cave, and if I move the covers too briskly getting into bed, she pops awake and there are consequences. This is exacerbated by the fact that she goes to bed much earlier than I do, so creeping in there can be a challenge.

I tell you this so you’ll understand that if I was a regular snorer it would have been noted. So, like I said, I went to bed the night before as Normal Jeff, operating as per specifications, and then invisibly transformed into Jeff What Snores Like a Motherfucker, somehow. There was no warning, and it’s been a steady deal ever since. I snore, period. I am now a person who snores. Some fleshy part of my head that I don’t have full control over has gotten weak and lazy in my middle age and given up doing its fucking job.

The Implements

I have an endless, infinite faith in science and its ability to solve all my problems, so I began researching snoring. I installed an App to track my snoring performances, and JEBUS CHRISTUS it was a revelation.

You see, I sleep really well. So initially when The Duchess told me I snored like a motherfucker who had swallowed a snoring machine it’s not that I didn’t believe her, exactly, but it seemed impossible. I slept so soundly, how could I be unaware of this thunderous noise I was making? But the App recorded you when your snoring became noticeable, and I woke up the next day with all these audio recordings of me buzzing away like a character out of an old-timey cartoon.

So I began trying things. I tried Breathe-Rite strips, which open up the nasal passageways, as well as nasal dilators, which do the same thing from the inside of your nose. I tried mouthpieces that adjust your jaw position. I found these things called Theravents that you stick on your nostrils which essentially, as far as I can tell, solve the problem by forcing you to breathe through your mouth. The latter two actually do work, although the mouthpieces kind of irritate my teeth, and the Theravents cause … excessive drooling.

Drool

There are few things that, in my opinion, separate me from the animals. The ability to play video games. The understanding that pedestrians always have the right of way. The knowledge that neat is always the best way to enjoy whiskey no matter what anyone else says. And a lack of drooling.

Now, though, I have a trade off: I can snore and keep my precious bodily fluids inside my mouth like a normal person, or I can stop snoring and wake up with a disgusting flood of saliva everywhere. This is a non-ideal scenario, but since in both cases I am sleeping soundly but in only one is The Duchess not straddling me with a gun in my face like in the film Goodfellas, my choice is clear: Drool.

So there you go: I am a snoring, drooling mess. Happy New Year!

FRIENDS, many of you know that I’m married, and not to just any person, but to The Duchess, a formidable woman who can bench press me and whose mastery of Retail Science is unparalleled. What she sees in me will forever be a mystery, and I am a lucky man to have her. That doesn’t mean being married to The Duchess is all gravy, though; there’s a cost. A bitter cost largely measured out in hours spent following her around various stores while she shops.

England Expects that Every Man Will Do His Duty

Why The Duchess wants me there when she shops is another mystery, frankly, as I am a sullen and unenthusiastic shopper, and also quite ignorant of the ways of fashion. I can only assume that the strange and unexpected affection she has for me overpowers her common sense, leading me to accompanying her to places where one is expected to understand the difference between boot cut things and skinny things, places where more than seven colors are acknowledged to exist.

My role when accompanying The Duchess on these trips is mainly to follow her around. There is an art to this.

The art largely involves maintaining a suitably aloof and bemused expression—note, bemused, not amused, as the former implies I am a willing participant in this madness while the latter implies that I will be severely beaten by an unamused wife when I get home—and endurance. You have to be in good shape when you follow The Duchess around, because it’s a marathon, not a sprint. And there are no complimentary cocktails or snacks, usually. Although, sometimes, in particularly ritzy stores.

This can, but does not have to, also involve striking poses as you stand around attempting to look like this is totally how you always intended to spend this particular afternoon, as if decades ago you pulled out your Book of Intentions and penned in that day for ‘following my beloved around like a vagrant who hopes to get a dollar from her just to go away.’ There are a lot of mirrors in these shops, and I find myself to be very attractive, and so adopting the poses I imagine Very Attractive Men of Mystery use in their daily lives makes me feel like maybe I’m generating buzz among the shop employees, maybe they’re going into the back and chatting about this really cool man of mystery who’s entered the store standing like a superhero, possibly intending to purchase every item in the place with his credit card that’s so advanced it’s not black or platinum but rather invisible.

The Chores

Once you’ve got the art side of shopping with the Duchess down cold, there are some basic duties that come with the position:

1. Picking up The Duchess’ things. The Duchess, in an excess of excitement, often drops whatever she is carrying and/or wearing as she rushes to the sales rack, and it is my sacred duty to pick up her jacket, sweater, wallet, keys, shoes, and anything else that has exploded off of her in a burst of kinetic shopping energy.

2. Making Small Talk. The shop staff will be barely tolerated and acknowledged by The Duchess, who knows more about their products than they do. As she races about, I form a sad fellowship with these people and make conversation to reassure them that despite being completely ignored by my wife, they do in fact exist.

3. Paying. This is not because I am a man, or because I have all the money. In fact, The Duchess outearns me by a significant amount. But The Duchess has little time for the details of shopping, and once she has decided on, say, a rust-orange turtleneck, size medium, marked 40% off with an additional 25% off coupon applied, she is off to the next shop, leaving me to fumble out the credit card and make more awkward conversation with the staff.

Like I said: Not all gravy. This line of work isn’t for everyone—especially the posing.

One of the few pleasures of growing old, in my crusty opinion, is the clarity you get about yourself and the space you occupy on the saint—asshole spectrum. I lean heavily towards asshole, and while I’m not proud of it I’m at least aware, and if I choose not to do anything about it, it’s on me. How do I know I’m kind of a prick? Well, it’s always been there: the self-centeredness, the cruel snark, the emotional laziness. As I age the signs simply become more overt.

For example, I’m engaged in a multi-year experiment to see how long it takes you to be removed from people’s holiday cards lists.

Lump of Coal, Here I Come

When I was a young man, I put a lot of effort into my holiday cards as part of my I AM AN ADULT DAMMIT charm offensive. I drew doodles, I hand-wrote poems, I made those things sing, baby. Of course, it wasn’t because I loved everyone on my list so damn much. I wanted everyone to be impressed and tell me how awesome my holiday cards were.

Now I am old and it takes me 1/85th of my life just to wake up in the morning, so that kind of effort is obviously impossible. As is any kind of effort at all, to be honest. On the one hand, I’ve turned into 110% Grinch, and the holiday season just irritates me in every single way to the point where I want to become a Super Villain who goes out at night to tear down holiday decorations and hand out toothbrushes at Halloween, and on the other hand holiday cards increasingly seem like Old People Facebook, a way of pretending you’re in touch with someone.

I mean, I get holiday cards from cousins I haven’t spoken to in decades. What the fuck?

So, about, jeebs, probably fifteen years ago now I stopped sending out holiday cards. And the volume of cards received dropped steadily as people got insulted or assumed I’d finally drunk myself to death, but I’m still getting a dozen every year. Which is either folks not cleaning up their mailing lists, or people vindictively trying to make me feel like a dick for not reciprocating.

Which: Respect. That’s something I would do. I picture them with Peter Capaldi’s eyes from Doctor Who when they mail the cards to me.

Joke’s on them: I’m gonna pursue this goal until I get zero holiday cards. And then I’ll have one of those Mad Men zoom out moments where I sit alone in a diner and stare at my coffee as I realize I am mortal and an asshole no matter how much I like myself.

So, just one more reason for me to accept the fact that I am not a good person, and will probably become less good as I age, until I die alone and unremarked-upon, eaten by cats and buried by disinterested city employees. Huzzah! That calls for a drink!